10:15 Saturday Night

Sarah showed up at Ziggy’s with two shopping bags. One had a couple of her favorite movies on VHS and a pile of comic books.

The other had a set of red flannel pajamas for me. I sat on the couch and unwrapped the tissue paper and held them up. “How did you know I don’t have pajamas?”
“A little bird named Ziggy told me.” She sat on one side of me and Ziggy was on the other.

“I told her at the least I knew you didn’t have any here,” he emphasized. “But that I’d never seen you wear anything to bed but a ratty T-shirt.”

A spike of anxiety hit me in the throat. They both saw it and touched me gently, like bookends reminding me they were there. Ziggy said my name.

Just getting the words out was difficult, because between each word I wanted to hyperventilate. “You promise you’re not ganging up on me to send me away somewhere?”

“Oh, jeezus, no.” Sara leaned her forehead against my shoulder. “These are for wearing at home, not some hospital.”

“Okay.” I felt better. The fear had been momentary. It was a reminder I wasn’t all there yet and that I had shit to deal with.

But not right at this moment.

Ziggy kissed me behind the ear. “Why don’t you go put them on?”

“Go, like there’s somewhere else in this apartment to go.” The office or the bathroom were the only real choices. The rest was all open plan. Besides, it seemed silly to go somewhere to change clothes when Sarah had watched the two of us have sex more than once. (Right? The blow job contest at Jordan’s, and New Year’s Eve…? My memories of that New Year’s Eve were pretty fuzzy.) I stood up and stripped out of what I was wearing–a ratty T-shirt and sweatpants–and put the pajamas on. They were comfy-soft, even if they smelled new.

Ziggy was already in his bathrobe. While Sarah went to the bathroom, he dug through the other bag. “Well, well.”

“What’d she bring?”

He spread an assortment of Jean Claude Van Damme movies across the coffee table. I was only vaguely aware of him because one of my former housemates, or their girlfriend, had liked his movies. “I’ve seen that one,” I said, pointing to Bloodsport. “There used to be a copy of it floating around the Allston house.”

“You still call it ‘the Allston house’ even though it’s your house,” Ziggy said with a hint of amusement.

“Just because I bought it didn’t change it.” I shrugged.

He picked a film called Lionheart and put it into the VHS player. Sarah came back from the bathroom in a white silk robe and pajamas patterned with tasteful black representations of birds, like something you’d see on a Japanese room-divider.

“Oooh, I want those,” Ziggy said.

“I knew you’d like them,” she said, doing a little twirl. “Now tell me you have some microwave popcorn, please?”

“What sort of heathens do you take us for? It’s in the cabinet next to the fridge,” Ziggy said.

Within a minute she was making popcorn and Ziggy was fast-forwarding through a bunch of previews.

Hours later we’d watched three movies, eaten a pizza as well as popcorn, and were lying around in Ziggy’s bed reading the comic books. At one point Sarah started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Ziggy leaned over to try to see what she was reading.

“It’s not this,” she said, closing the comic book. “It’s just, I bet this isn’t what most people think a bunch of international pop sensations do when they get together on a Saturday night.”

Ziggy clucked his tongue and sneered. “We’ve done the clubs, the dancing, the drugs, the orgies. Been there, done that.”

While I said, “Wait. It’s Saturday?”

—

(There are a LOT of songs about Saturdays. But I couldn’t pass up one of my favorites from the very very early days of The Cure. -d)

Nowadays my smart phone tells me, but back then if we weren’t on tour my ability to tell which day it was went completely out the window. Which was fine except once I needed to start keeping track of appointments.